Anonymous claims responsibility for Home Office website hack

DDoS attack takes down government site

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Anonymous says it is behind an attack which brought down the government's official Home Office website this weekend.

The Hacktivist group is said to have used a simple denial of service attack, which it had first announced via Twitter on Wednesday, proclaiming it would be attacking UK Government websites every Saturday.

Following the successful take-down, a triumphant Anonymous wrote on Twitter: "TANGO DOWN - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk For your draconian surveillance proposals! Told you to #ExpectUs!"

The group also claimed to have flooded the Prime Minister's official number10.gov.uk website with requests, although no widespread outage has been confirmed.

Double trouble

The DDoS attack has also been linked to extradition policy, especially concerning the long-running case of Gary McKinnon, the Asperger's sufferer who faces being handed over to the US on hacking charges.

No private data lost

A Home Office spokeswoman confirmed the attack, which restricted access to the Home Office site from 21:00 BST on Saturday night until 05:00 on Sunday morning.

She said: "The Home Office website was the subject of on online protest last night. This is a public facing website and no sensitive information is held on it.

"There is no indication that the site was hacked and other Home Office systems were not affected."

She also claimed measures have been put in place to protect the website against future attacks.

However, with knowledge of the planned attack in the public domain since Wednesday, many will wonder why those precautions were not put in place prior to the event.